Nabeel Rajab awarded of the Vaclav Avel Prize for his committment to human rights

Today, Nabeel Rajab, the famous Bahraini opponent , has been awarded of the Vaclav Avel Prize for his committment to human rights.

In effect, he is the co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.

He fought for them when he was free.

Now, he is jailed for tweeting critics of the government, and he receives this prize in prison.

I wrote for him to demand his freedom , and I write this post in the same goal. Tweeting is not a delict, and he is a prisoner of conscience.

The Bahraini authorities accused him of defamation and his hard critics of the government led him to jail.

There is no more active petitions for his liberation, but here is what Human Rights Watch write on him , to sum up his case , and show he is unjustly jailed:

Nabeel Rajab, human rights activist and co-founder of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), has spent several periods in prison for his peaceful criticism of the Bahraini government. On August 16, 2012 a criminal court sentenced Rajab to three years in prison under for organizing and participating in three demonstrations between January and March 2012 and for calling for unauthorized marches through social networking sites. The verdict cited no evidence that Rajab participated in or advocated violent protests. After completing his two-year prison sentence on May 24, 2014 he was arrested again on October 1 for criticizing the Bahraini government for using counterterrorism laws to prosecute human rights defenders, and accusing security forces of fostering violent beliefs akin to those of the Islamic State, noting that an Interior Ministry employee appeared on YouTube urging members of security forces to defect. On January 20, 2015 a criminal court convicted Rajab for offending national institutions via online comments, and sentenced Rajab to six months in prison. Rajab, who has suffered from ill-treatment during his various arrests, was released on July 14, 2015 for health reasons after King Hamad commuted his sentence. He still faces two other charges of “disseminating false news in times of war” and “insulting a statutory body” after he Tweeted about the torture of detainees in Jau Prison and Bahrain’s participation in the Saudi-led airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, for which he could face up to fifteen years in prison. Authorities arrested Rajab again on June 13, 2016 over tweets that criticized the Saudi-led the war in Yemen and Bahrain’s treatment of prisoners. As of September 2016 he was on trial for “spreading false news” in an attempt to discredit Bahrain,” “offending a foreign country [Saudi Arabia],” and “offending national institutions.”